with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not long after the September massacres of 1792.  Those were the days, too, in which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at Bristol, were planning a “Pantisocracy,” or ideal community, on the banks of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to war with the French Republic.  This group of poets, who had met one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated.  The so-called “Lakers” did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry.  They differed greatly from one another in mind and art.  But they were connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies.  The excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them into the ranks of the reactionaries.  Advancing years brought conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox churchmen.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his Lyrical Ballads in 1798.  The volume contained a few pieces by his friend Coleridge—­among them the Ancient Mariner—­and its appearance may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.  Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, he defended the theory on which they were composed.  His innovations were twofold:  in subject-matter and in diction.  “The principal object which I proposed to myself in these poems,” he said, “was to choose incidents and situations from common life.  Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity...and are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”  Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, and professed to use “a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”  He adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic life, “because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.”

In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice, adhere to the doctrine of this preface.  Many of his most admired poems, such as the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, the great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Sonnets, and many parts of his longest poems, The Excursion and The Prelude, deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions.  In all of these and in many others the language is rich, stately,